Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967 - 2014

Whether embodying a near shut-in, choking on loneliness, his body collapsing in on itself, or a master communicator and manipulator, drunk on his own Kool-Aid, given to sudden ecstatic gestures and charismatic dance, Philip Seymour Hoffman conveyed a sense of bearing heavy burden like few others could. He was imminently melancholic, weighty, the most corpulent yet full-bodied of actors. He rarely looked comfortable in his body, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t use it, often with tremendous nuance. He was Sisyphian. Which is to say that, no matter how elephantine the burden he carried, he felt it incumbent upon himself to keep going up that hill. He was never not doing something active and compelling, never resigned to playing mere attitude. I’m struck, now, by how often his characters’ burdens involved ingestible vice: bad food, alcohol, drugs. He played a gas-huffer, a heroin addict, Lester Bangs. He perspired need. He was an all-round gifted, hard-working actor, but at this especially he was extraordinary: desperation. I just wish that the way he died didn’t so closely mirror his work.

top: Boogie Nights

bottom: The Big Lebowski

You couldn’t possibly pay the slightest attention to interesting American movies in the past 15 years and not know him. The high forehead, vulnerable, pale, a seawall against which all manner of earthly pressures crashed. That voice, typically nasal, often sounding like he’d dragged it out of bed, the mattress sweaty and half-stripped, before bashing it on the night table on the way up. Those cupping paws that looked like they had to have the cigarettes pushed into them. The eyes—they seemed to change all the time, hard to soft, pinned to orb-like, sometimes sexy. I first saw Hoffman in Hard Eight (1996), Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut. He played an arrogant mullet trying to bend a craps table to his will through sheer bullying. By Boogie Nights (1997), Anderson’s follow-up, I was really paying attention. He was a chubby, anguished pubescent in a man’s body, under-dressed, not easy to cuddle, though he tried to kiss Dirk Diggler with so much closeted passion. A small but memorable role in The Big Lebowski (1998) found him more uptight, nervous and really funny. It made clear that there was no limiting his range; no matter the lack of movie star handsomeness he would break out from the character actor ghetto. In Happiness (1998), this burden I keep thinking about was already fully formed. He was so pathetic yet so watchable, savouring Todd Solondz’s writing, even when its comic despair felt a little cheap.

from top to bottom: The Savages, 

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 

Synecdoche New York

As Hoffman’s boyishness fell away, which it did rapidly, he became a go-to guy for a certain anxious weariness, and his work increasingly seemed focused on finding truth in the grotesque, as though the only empathy worth earning was the sort that rose from weakness. In Capote (2005) he gave a precision performance that hinges on his insistence on giving equal attention to the titular character’s fascination with others and his ultimate ruthlessness. Capote won Hoffman the Best Actor Oscar, but that performance was easily bested only a couple of years later in, for example, The Savages (2007), as Laura Linney’s brother, or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), as Ethan Hawke’s brother. We see him shoot heroin in that movie, and we see him die. He played the much-doubted priest in Doubt (2008), who you keep feeling for even when you’re almost sure he really is a pederast. He was the only one who could have starred in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York (2008), in which he’s attacked by his own sink, dates a woman in a burning house, and watches his adult daughter deteriorate before his eyes. He plays a nobody playwright who gets genius grant and decides to make a play about everything. Rehearsals go on for all his life. His character’s art becomes infinite, boundless, beyond the frame. Life itself. The film is unbearably sad, but I’ll be damned if Hoffman doesn’t make every scene feel relevant, forward-moving. It was his most Sisyphian role.

The Master

What I will admire most in this filmography is Hoffman’s mesmerizing, Wellesian convergence of hysteria and colossal confidence in Anderson’s The Master (2012), about a very American longing for self-made religion, and one of the great films of this young century. As L. Ron Hubbard stand-in Lancaster Dodd, Hoffman seemed older than ever, but that fatherliness made him eerily persuasive, repeating questions like a relentlessly applied balm to Joaquin Phoenix’s wounded Freddie, and later, in that strange and haunting final meeting between master and pupil, singing to Freddie about how he wants to get him alone on a slow boat to China. The Master also emphasized how much Hoffman could do with repressed anger, that scene where Dodd is so determined to shame a guy bold enough to confront him publicly by using only wit and a sense of wonder, yet he can’t help but suddenly spit out “Pig fuck!” The rage is always there, but he masks it with playfulness and ambition and that weird bonhomie.

I write all this to remember Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose last weekend at the appallingly young age of 46, leaving behind three kids, his partner, Mimi O’Donnell, and countless colleagues and friends. It is just so sad. He was a prolific actor who I’ve had the immense pleasure of spending much time watching, listening to, thinking about, writing about. I interviewed him only once. He could be prickly, and it wasn’t the easiest conversation, but it was rewarding. Our talk ended with the topic of death in Capote, and Hoffman’s last words stick in my mind now. “It’s like Capote has come to bear witness to all these 
deaths,” he said. “And the truth he discovers is that they don’t pass through him 
without leaving marks.” 

                  

2012: the year in movies

The Master

A detail-saturated 65-mm epic composed most memorably of close-ups, a chronologically vast historical chamber drama, a harrowing portrait of a damage-case stumbling into an immensely peculiar found-family, an essay about the persistent desire for self-made religion in the postwar American landscape: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, about an uneasy alliance between an alcoholic veteran and a new age guru, is haunting. Along with the next few titles it was one of the films that instantly sprang to mind when asked to consider the cinematic highlights of 2012. It’s difficult, at times unspeakably painful. It’s also a masterwork in which every contribution, the photography, the scoring, the writing and acting (from Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman most especially), feels at once maverick and rigorously devoted to a collective vision.

Tabu

Tabu, Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes’ inventive diptych slips from drab, ineffective current-day Lisbon to dangerous, decadent and dizzily romantic colonial Africa, from starkly composed scenes of deadpan realism to fluid, florid scenes of semi-silent melodrama, from the lonesome battiness of age to the recklessness and beauty of youth. We meet an elderly woman slowly fading into dementia and then meet that same woman 50 years earlier, precariously bored, pregnant, roped into an affair with a drummer, and handy with firearms. Tabu is formally daring, intelligent, and lyrical.

top: In the Family
bottom: Margaret

Writer, director, producer and star Patrick Wang’s quietly audacious In the Family follows Joey, a decent, hard-working and very suddenly widowed father accustomed to accommodating others and keeping his frustrations to himself. The grieving family of his deceased partner attempts to gain custody of Joey’s little boy with the utmost passive-aggressiveness, and Joey’s forced to find the resources to fight back. Did I forget to mention that Joey’s partner was a man? In the Family manages to be fiercely politicized while never even uttering the word “gay.” It is the most startlingly accomplished, tremendously moving American independent debut since Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (2000). Let’s hope Wang doesn’t have to wait as long as Lonergan to offer a follow-up—Lonergan’s cursed but exquisite character/moral study Margaret never screened anywhere in Canada to my knowledge, but you can find it now on DVD. I strongly recommend the longer, director’s cut.

The Deep Blue Sea

Speaking of follow-ups: Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, based on Terrence Rattigan’s play, seems to begin where Davies’ 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth left off: with a woman alone in a room with suicide. The trajectory is not quite as dire, but the desperation and longing are thick as London fog in this story of reckless transgression: Hester (a particularly brilliant, courageous, and sexy Rachel Weisz) is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, a mama’s boy, and tender-loving in a way that has nothing to do with passion. Hester leaves William for Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a former RAF pilot who happens to be a war hero and, it turns out, a real cad. The film is at once raw and elegant, generous and merciless: people have their reasons, and Davies finds reasons to sympathize with everyone.

Miss Bala

Which is a feat that Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo also somehow manages to pull off in Miss Bala, his eerily first-person, claustrophobic, nerve-rattling chronicle of a young woman (a convincingly traumatized Stephanie Sigman) who haphazardly decides to enter the Miss Baja California competition and winds up becoming the pretty pawn for a gang of violent drug traffickers led by the inscrutable yet magnetic Noé Hernández, an actor who, like Sigman, we’ll hopefully be seeing more of soon.

top: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

bottom: Keyhole

Miss Bala was only one of a trio of inspired, eccentric crime stories to grace screens in 2012: Turkey’s acclaimed atmospherist Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s philosophical police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia begins with a long, maddening search for the scene of a crime, while Winnipeg master-fabulist Guy Maddin’s mythical gangster ghost story Keyhole begins at its familial hearth-crime scene and never leaves. Wildly different in tone and technique as these films are—Anatolia is mostly outdoors, earth-toned, frequently very still and meditative; Keyhole is black and white, gauzy, a happy clutter of objects, and encounters bordering on weirdo-farce—I like how both elide the generic resolutions they initially seem geared toward and how they turn meandering into a kind of beguiling form of narrative motion.

top: The Imposter

bottom: Stories We Tell

Still, no crime story generated more astonishment and post-screening conversation in my house than The Imposter, Bart Layton’s documentary thriller about the very strange case of Frédéric Bourdin, the Franco-Algerian who could barely speak English yet, at the age of 23, convinced a white rural Texan family he was their long-missing 15-year-old boy—or did he? I’ve never seen a film so fully investigate the notion of identity theft as a collective agreement or act of tacit consent. Which is to say that The Imposter is a movie about playing roles and telling stories as a group activity, which leads us directly to Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, a sort of memoir about Polley’s attempts to uncover the true story behind old family rumours about her dead mother’s secret life and the possibility that her father might not be her father.

top: Alps

bottom: Bestiare

No film more explicitly explored the compulsion toward role-play as Yorgos Lanthimos’ loopy and inspired Alps, in which a quartet of Athenians devise a new business model that involves impersonating recently deceased individuals for the ostensible comfort of their grieving loved ones. (Now there’s a remedy for cataclysmic economic depression!) Likewise, no film more provocatively prompted questions about how the spectator identifies with and/or assigns roles to the figures s/he sees on screen that Quebecois auteur Denis Côté’s masterfully composed and ambiguous Bestiare, which makes its subject the inhabitants/inmates/objects of fascination within the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. All this talk of role-play also gives me the perfect segue into mentioning the year’s most blessedly batshit magnum opus, Leos Carax’s unholy Holy Motors, in which Denis Levant, surely one of the greatest mutant-level all-round acting wizards in world cinema, is driven to one strange fantasy setting after another, where he transforms himself into one character after another. All in a day’s work, apparently. His job seems to involve nothing so much as merging his able body with the musings of his director’s ferociously fertile imagination.

Holy Motors

Holy Motors, like Tabu, is unapologetically a movie very much in love with the movies. But really, what could possible inspire more movie love than Mark Cousins’ hugely ambitious, iconoclastic yet authoritative 15-part documentary The Story of Film? Its understanding of the true scope of cinema’s world history—not just the history of the world’s wealthiest, most stable and shrewdest exporters—is breathtaking. And it makes peering into cinema’s future feel that much more enticing.  

     

Crazy in love

After helming a pair of lengthy, ambitious ensemble dramas—the beloved Boogie Nights (1997) and the more divisive Magnolia (1999)—Paul Thomas Anderson, already a seasoned director in his early 30s, reclaimed the long-neglected romantic comedy for filmgoers who actually value things like invention, audacity and risk—traits common to the genre in its 1940s heyday—with Punch-Drunk Love (2002). The gamble paid-off among critics and cinephiles at least, winning Anderson Best Director at Cannes and winning Adam Sandler the grudging admiration of viewers who couldn’t stand most of his other movies. (A similar trick was pulled off with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004], an even more inventive, more resonant film about love and its unnerving proximity to mental illness, in which Jim Carrey gave a rare emotionally textured performance—which is to say he wasn’t totally unbearable for anyone over the age of eight.) Sadly, the film failed to recoup its hefty $25-million dollar budget, but then Anderson’s models seem more aligned to silent comedies, certain MGM musicals or A Perfect Couple (1979), Robert Altman’s woefully underrated stab at the genre, than to contemporary box office-behemoth schmaltz like, say, You’ve Got Mail (1998). 

Sandler’s Barry Egan has seven emasculating sisters, a small business wholesaling novelty toilet supplies, and one painfully blue, not very flattering suit, which he wears through the entirety of Punch-Drunk Love and which must smell really, really bad by the end, given that Barry travels from California to Hawaii and Utah and generally gets nervous and runs around a lot. Barry also obsesses over special retail offers, suffers devastating levels of depression and/or anxiety, exhibits violent tendencies and is socially awkward in the extreme—in several regards, Barry’s not so different from Freddie Quell, the protagonist of Anderson’s far more somber The Master (2012). If Anderson’s highly focused, minimally cut, deliberately jarring direction didn’t encourage us to laugh or marvel at Barry’s unbridled distress, we’d be really worried about the guy. But Punch-Drunk Love is true to the rom-com’s promise of unlikely redemption, sending Barry an angel in the form of Emily Watson, an attractive, patient, quietly peculiar woman who not only fancies Barry but seems to fancy him precisely because he’s a fucking maniac—there’s a memorable scene that finds the lovers exchanging whispered sweet nothings that describe grotesque violence, a scene that may have inspired a similar motif in Take This Waltz (2011). Given the nature of her more recent work, it’s great to see Watson in a role that allows her to be sexy and mysterious. Unfortunately, I think the film’s one significant flaw may be her character’s lack of development. I get that Anderson wanted to make Punch-Drunk Love as fleet as possible, and to keep Barry firmly at the centre, but I believe that Barry’s pathos would have been only strengthened by a deeper sense of what sort of woman could so easily fall in love with him.

Anyway, Punch-Drunk Love is a very special, and very, very funny, genuinely nutty film. It also features a wonderful supporting turn from one of my favourite contemporary character actors, Luis Guzmán. Now it only somebody would make him the lead in a romantic comedy!